A somewhat quirky offering this morning, which I’m all in favour of. Slightly tougher than your average Monday. As occasionally happens, my last in was 1 across, where the literal is not very congruent, but somehow that accords with the overall whimsy.
25:06
| Across | |
|---|---|
| 1 | Greyish-brown VW Golf stops being in motion (4,6) |
| DUNG BEETLE – G (Golf) in DUN (greyish-brown) BEETLE (VW); dung beetles are smart cookies that navigate by sun, moon, wind and Milky Way. They also move and – on edit, their life revolves around bowel movements, i.e. motion. My last, as in final, car was a Golf GTi. I never fell in love with it. I pined for my Echo. Go fig, as those Americans say. | |
| 6 | Place small collection of bets (4) |
| SPOT – S POT (as in, ‘Have you put 50p in the pot yet, chuck?’) | |
| 10 | Crush advanced Ottoman position (5) |
| PASHA – PASH (God, I hate this word!) A ; here’s Collins – ‘a provincial governor or other high official of the Ottoman Empire’ | |
| 11 | Panhandle city confines American pop (9) |
| PENSACOLA – PENS A COLA; a write-in for me since |
|
| 12 | They might have eyes, but they won’t be peeled (6,8) |
| JACKET POTATOES – nice cryptic definition; baking potatoes rather than boiling them is a good way to make mashed potatoes if you have the time (less watery) | |
| 14 | Say G Company fitted with singular shell casing (3,4) |
| EGG COSY – EG G S (singular) in COY; gee, it’s 50-odd years since I’ve seen one of these | |
| 15 | Tiny child violinist failing to start on time (7) |
| TIDDLER – T |
|
| 17 | Criminal back in Parkhurst — old, abandoned (1,3,3) |
| A BAD LOT – a reverse hidden; ‘Ooh, Mavis, he’s a bad lot, is that one at No. 22!’ | |
| 19 | Arrogant, as Bill might be (5-2) |
| STUCK-UP – Who can ever forget the immortal warning, ‘BILL STICKERS WILL BE PROSECUTED’? Poor old Bill. | |
| 20 | Collection of poems represented real hardship so (1,10,3) |
| A SHROPSHIRE LAD – an anagram* of REAL HARDSHIP SO; I read it once, but probably got a bit lost when it became too lyrical, as I tend to do. | |
| 23 | Harsh, “discontented” Italian Pope? (9) |
| INCLEMENT – I~N CLEMENT (pope – quite a few of them, as I recall) | |
| 24 | Exclamation from Spooner upon seeing flying carpet? (2,3) |
| MY HAT – ‘High mat!’ Is this an all-in-one? Is it a plane? Is it Superman? | |
| 25 | Goddess last seen on gin, regularly pickled (4) |
| NIKE – |
|
| 26 | Starts to follow at distance, somehow intrigued (10) |
| FASCINATED – F~A~ DISTANCE* | |
| Down | |
|---|---|
| 1 | Patsy expected to absorb pressure (4) |
| DUPE – P in DUE | |
| 2 | North and east German area left Joe with a sense of wistfulness (9) |
| NOSTALGIA – N OST A L GI A | |
| 3 | Landmark new Waterloo block with parking thrown in (9,5) |
| BLACKPOOL TOWER – P in WATERLOO BLOCK* | |
| 4 | English course penetrating this writer’s compassionate feelings (7) |
| EMPATHY – E PATH in MY | |
| 5 | Rugby restart has popular centre finally punching oaf (4-3) |
| LINE-OUT – IN (popular) |
|
| 7 | Snap up hot oatcake wraps (5) |
| PHOTO – our second hidden | |
| 8 | Copy crossing underground cell, according to reports? (10) |
| TRANSCRIPT – TRANS (the prefix trans- means ‘crossing’, eg transatlantic) sounds like ‘crypt’ | |
| 9 | Mum, granny, daughter put together great piece for play (3,3,8) |
| MAN AND SUPERMAN – MA NAN D (you put these together) SUPER (great) MAN ([chess] piece); a play by Shaw which no one reads. The fate of all his plays these days. | |
| 13 | Fed up violin maker subject to calumny (10) |
| DEFAMATION – FED reversed AMATI ON (subject to – Collins has ‘a doctor on call’ as an example) | |
| 16 | Quickly left furniture store with picture (4,1,4) |
| LIKE A SHOT – L IKEA SHOT | |
| 18 | Part of picture from the Durbeyfield period? (7) |
| TESSERA – TESS ERA; from Housman to Shaw to Hardy; tesserae are the little tiles that make up mosaics | |
| 19 | To do with hip cats I managed on island clubs (7) |
| SCIATIC – CATS I* followed by I C; sciatic comes from the Greek word for hip bone. Most of the sciatica sufferers I know have pain in the legs or the lower back, which are of course both very much in the vicinity. | |
| 21 | Journo includes electronic attachment to letter from Prague (5) |
| HACEK – E in HACK; the háček, or caron, is the inverted circumflex (seen in the eponymous word itself) that indicates a change of pronunciation in Slavonic languages. | |
| 22 | Film maker sacking satellite boss (4) |
| STUD – STUD |
|
Enjoyable and I agree – slightly tougher Monday than usual. Didn’t know tessera (18d) nor hacek (21d) and resorted to aids for 20a. The punnish direct meaning for 1a finally twigged and was one of my last in. 27.01.
DUNG BEETLE was my first one in! 40 minutes of very enjoyable solving. Just what a weekday puzzle should be. My only unknown /forgotten was HACEK but the wordplay was helpful.
Yes, dung beetle a write-in for me too. Enjoyed this, and no queries or MERs, though I thought Hacek was some sort of Czech playwright (or Prime Minister, or both) and wasn’t sure what a panhandle was.
I had the same hesitation re Haček until I remembered Vačlav Havel who was as you say both playwright and Prime Minister.
Not to mention Karel Capek, who invented the term “robot.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karel_%C4%8Capek
DUNG BEETLE was my second one in, after I’d bunged in DUPE to eliminate STAG and finally saw the meaning of “motion”. Nice. After that, pretty much straight top-to-bottom, though I had to scribble out the anagram fodder for A SHROPSHIRE LAD before I saw it.
TESSERA my last one in as I’ve only read Far from the Madding Crowd, but on the plus side more modern literature—John Courtenay Grimwood’s Pashazade—made 10a easy. 27 mins.
7:06. Pretty breezy. I was slightly concerned about HACEK but trusted the wordplay.
24.09 – assumed the ‘motion’ in DUNG BEETLE was more of the sort the doctor might ask you about, but I’m sure they can get up a good head of steam as well? Came here for the parsing of A BAD LOT really. Chewiest Monday in a while, but all the better for that! Liked MY HAT quite a bit actually. Tiny spoonerisms are real gems. Thanks blogger and setter!
Ah, that kind of motion! Now you say it, possibly makes more sense of the otherwise rather vague definition. It’s not Sunday, but even so.
17:57. First entry in my top 10 and easiest Monday for ages. Being a Shrophire Lad originally may have helped, having most of the GK certainly did.
NHO TESSERA (as in Tesseract?) or HACEK and needed the wordplay for spelling of PENSACOLA.
COD DUNG BEETLE, typically scatalogical. Thanks to Ulaca and setter.
18.17 which is brisk for me, and an enjoyably tricksy puzzle. Kept trying to fit “Strad” into 13dn until I remembered that Amati is the cruciverbalist’s preferred violin maker. I wonder if we’ll ever see Guarneri?
FOI JACKET POTATOES
LOI EGG COSY
COD TESSERA
Thanks U and setter
11.10
A gentle start to the week, with lots to enjoy, especially the definition at 1ac.
Nice to see ‘criminal’ not used as an anagrind for a change.
Here’s a coincidence: Joan Osborne’s song ‘PENSACOLA’, about regretting tracking down her estranged father in a trailer in the sand, contains the lyric
“He got the gospel on the radio
And the gospel on TV
He got all of the TRANSCRIPTs
Back to 1963”
LOI and COD DUNG BEETLE
I really enjoyed this one. Blackpool Tower, scene of so many happy memories, including the 4th October 1950, when my late sister’s boil burst at the top. Going up was my fifth birthday treat. I too confused HACEK with the playwright politician but it doesn’t matter how you get them. COD to the beetle. Thank you U and setter.
Just under half an hour.
– Slowed myself down by putting LAYS for 6a (place=lay + S, with ‘collection of bets’ as the definition), and never thought it might be wrong until I realised that 7d had to be PHOTO and corrected to SPOT
– Couldn’t have told you where PENSACOLA is, but the checkers pushed me in the right direction
– Didn’t know that the bits that sprout on potatoes are known as eyes, so JACKET POTATOES went in with a shrug
– Hadn’t heard of MAN AND SUPERMAN but pieced it together from wordplay and checkers
– Got TESSERA without being sure how exactly it’s part of a picture
– Relied on the wordplay for the unknown HACEK
Thanks ulaca and setter.
FOI Nike
LOI Pensacola
COD Blackpool Tower
Just short of the hour with last three holding me up which seems to be becomming a bit a worrying repetition. They were DEFAMATION, DUNG BEETLE & PENSACOLA.
I Found this quite tricky, especially the unknown play, though, now I relook at it it’s not that difficult. Perhaps my brain is befuddled having spent the weekend gorging on rugby!
I liked JACKET POTATO best.
Thanks U and setter.
12.24, including time to spot a typo – hurrah!
Oddly enough, I was wondering about Panhandle recently: I gather it’s not just Florida, and indeed not all of Florida, but appears in several States. The city emerged from the crossers.
When I was recovering from a stroke, I trained my right hand to write again by laboriously transcribing “Into my heart…” from A Shropshire Lad – from memory! Impossible to describe the welter of emotions from that achievement: “the happy highways where I went and cannot come again.” Nostalgia, and yet the breakthrough hope.
Sometimes a puzzle is more than a puzzle.
Texas and Oklahoma are the other two states with panhandles which are called panhandles.
West Virginia
WVa has two, and I forgot them both. Sorry to our resident West Virginian.
This is why I love this forum! I was checking whether DUNG BEETLE was just a weak definition, only to say (how often does this happen) that the fault is mine. Great clue.
9:58. My first sub-10 minutes this year. I trusted to the wordplay for HACEK. LOI TRANSCRIPT. COD to DUNG BEETLE. Thanks Ulaca and setter.
Well, the city being for me a NHO, I had PENSASODA, which I think fits the wordplay. Otherwise inside 10 mins. Thanks ulaca and setter.
Very frustrated over here – I put in DUNE BEETLE, failing to spend the time to work out the parsing properly, and thinking in my haste that it was probably a version of DUNE BUGGY, or otherwise a type of beetle (a ‘being’).
In any event, my potential PB was ruined by the NHO “MAN AND SUPERMAN”, which took me about five minutes to guess at (fortunately correctly) from the wordplay. So 21:30 ish but WOE, and could have been so much better!
Not PONDAROSA then (without any justification) as NHO PENSACOLA (though I have heard of Panhandle City?)
NHO HAVEK, but definition was clear. Needed all the checkers for A Shropshire Lad (also NHO). Nice Monday puzzle though.
It took 19 mins, slightly fast for me. First in was JACKET POTATO and last DEFAMATION. I didn’t know PENSACOLA, but the checking letters and wordplay got me there – I toyed with PENSASODA, but it didn’t sound like a place name. My favourite clues were to A BAD LOT and LIKE A SHOT. Thank you to Setter and Blogger.
I had “Dune Beetle” for Ia.
Enjoyable 30′ or so on holiday. Didn’t even flinch at the Spooner. Didn’t know HACEK, nor “pash” but all the crossers made them straightforward. Enjoying 1ac even more with Mudge’s “motion” explanation which I completely missed.
Thanks Ulaca and setter
Good one for a Monday. I knew HACEK and who TESS was, enjoyed DUNG BEETLE and couldn’t remember what calumny was so had to get my LOI DEFAMATION from the wordplay. 29 minutes plus or minus one for a phone call.
A bit sluggish today as it took me ages to see DUNG BEETLE and LOI, MAN AND SUPERMAN. Nice puzzle though. Liked JACKET POTATOES and EGG COSY. DUPE was FOI. 27:38. Thanks setter and U.
17:33
I really enjoyed this. Witty with a slight literary bias; for me the perfect puzzle. I needed to come here to fully understand DUNG BEETLE which is now my COD. Pash always makes me think of Angela Brazil’s boarding school books and nowadays A SHROPSHIRE LAD always makes me think of Inspector Morse
Thanks to Ulaca, the setter and Mudge for the beetle.
For once the comments suggest that people found it more difficult than I did. Although I wasn’t really very fast, I completed it more quickly than many people who tend to be faster than I am, and with no particular problems. Was expecting a SNITCH in the 50s or even 40s. Good crossword in my opinion.
My thanks to ulaca and setter.
1a Dung Beetle took a while but succumbed with only a couple of crossers. Clever, but my COD goes to 16d for including IKEA in the answer, Like a shot.
LOI ‘DUNG BEETLE’. NHO ‘HAČEK’ but constructed it from the wordplay and it sounded right. Concerning ‘nostalgia’ Libby Purves’s column in today’s paper tells us that from 1688 it was regarded as a serious disorder, and was only purged from the medical literature ‘over a century ago’.
21:41
Beat my target of 22m30s (Snitch 75 at time of writing) – but a few bits missed:
PENSACOLA – guessed that panhandle referred to Florida, but probably knew fewer than half-a-dozen cities. Thought of this once I had the first four checkers in place (though still didn’t know if actually in Florida)
EGG COSY – took ages to see what came after EGG – forgot that company could be COY
A BAD LOT – failed to see the reverse hidden – bunged in once all checkers in place
A SHROPSHIRE LAD – never read it, wrote out letters with six out of seven checkers in place
DEFAMATION – pencilled in for ages, but forgot about AMATI
HACEK – NHO, so followed the cryptic
TESSERA – have read TESS – weren’t all of Hardy’s books just sooooo depressing
SCIATIC – oh! something to do with the hip, is it? I did not know that!
MAN AND SUPERMAN – as something of an amateur Penguin books collector, have seen this title many times, but have never read it
TRANSCRIPT – LOI
Thanks U and setter
13:20 – a slick offering at the easier end of things, though clever enough for me to miss the slyness of the beetle clue.
Hi, mat?
But does it account for the ‘flying?’
Certainly trickier than your average Monday, and an enjoyable puzzle. I new the Czech diacritic, but needed all the checkers in place for my LOI.
FOI JACKET POTATOES
LOI PENSACOLA
COD A SHROPSHIRE LAD
TIME 9:54
28 minutes. Very enjoyable with the DUNG BEETLE and EGG COSY defs my highlights.
Foiled by PENSACOLA as I thought that the Panhandle was only located in Texas and the only city that would fit was therefore Panhandle.
Annoying, as I raced through the rest although I thought ‘pot’ for ‘collection of bets’ was pushing it a bit.
43:30 well above my normal Monday times. An incorrect LAYS for STOP blocked me seeing the relatively simple PHOTO.
Not heard of the poetry, play, HACEK, TESSERA or the city so all had to be assembled. A couple parts of word play also not known.
Good, quirky puzzle but let down by my own lexicon today.
COD DUNG BEETLE
Thanks blogger and setter.
I found the puzzle amusing, but noted it required very specific knowledge. Of course I knew Pensacola, but Blackpool Tower is not so easy for a US solver. I tried to put in iliatic, which is not a word, and not the answer either, but then I looked again.
Time: 26:33
Apropos my earlier comment, I’m sure Ed Murrow, standing right at the top of the tower, covered the news of Lynda’s boil bursting for CBS.
I thoroughly enjoyed this one finishing in a respectable 32.43. I thought of DUNG BEETLE soon enough, but left it until the checkers confirmed it was right. Spent a little time trying to get STRAD into 13dn before remembering AMATI. Also having enough knowledge of the mere existence of MAN AND SUPERMAN and A SHROPSHIRE LAD was enough, never having read either.
Thoughtlessly entered toddler, unparsed and makes no sense but who has ever referred to a child as a tiddler? Annoyed with myself but enjoyed the puzzle hugely.
Thx U and setter
About 10 minutes for a very enjoyable puzzle, I like it when they chuck a bit of literature in. HACEK at the limits of my knowledge but recognised it as a thing once I’d constructed it from wordplay. Initially a bit bemused by DUNG BEETLE then realised what “motion” was doing, tee hee, so will give it joint COD with TESSERA.
I saw a production of Man and Superman in the 1960s. I think there was a car on stage at one point.
Tess Durbeyfield was told that her name was derived from the Norman surname d’Urbeville, and it all goes wrong from there.
A couple of tricky clues for a Monday. 7d had to be PHOTO, but it took me ages to realise it was a simple hidden answer. And I had to discount Manuscript and Typescript before I saw the light.
Very smooth, with one nugget dropped in from Mephisto (HACEK) to add some crunch. Found the definition for DUNG BEETLE rather strange.
Háček from the wordplay, and I am well impressed by others actually knowing it. The rest was something of just the right pace to do while the second half of a slightly one-sided, defense-dominated, Super Bowl played itself out
I also am a member of the OWL club as I put ‘dune beetle’, which doesn’t exist (or parse as a solution) but there is such a thing as a ‘dune cricket’ so my answer wasn’t completely stupid!
32 minutes, FOI STUCK-UP. I tried a sub-ten but failed, however pleased to have finished.
Didn’t find this easy and didn’t know PASH for crush so thought of push instead- my knowledge of Ottoman stuff being a little lax. So OWL for me and a bad start to the week!
35 minutes. Loved DUNG BEETLE and JACKET POTATOES. Had some trouble parsing EGG COSY until I remembered that “company” can be COY as well as CO. LOI PENSACOLA, although I remember its coming up in another puzzle a while ago.
My sister, who went to a boarding school, told me there were two things: squishes and pashes. One was from junior to senior, and one was senior to junior. But I can’t recall which was which. Know PENSACOLA from the musical DAMES AT SEA in a university production of which I once appeared. There’s a song which goes: Do you remember Pensacola?/ Sultry dеsire, passion on fire, under thе moon/ Those nights of splendor in Pensacola/ Lost in your arms, under the palms, near the lagoon. I had forgotten there was a Florida panhandle. I associate panhadle with Oklahoma. Don’t administrators put them in so that State A borders State B, or has a bit of coast? After the feathers in the stool last week, today we have the beetle in the dung. I got it right but didn’t get the motion-dung connection till I read the blog. For which thanks.
The Oklahoma panhandle exists because of the Missouri Compromise, which banned slavery below a certain parallel. Texas had to give up that strip of land when it joined the Union in order to keep slavery. For some reason the strip ended up being tacked on to Oklahoma some time later.
I think that should be north of a certain parallel!
DOH!
Pensacola bah; sub ten, sub 8 maybe, became twelve mins because of that. Never mind enjoyed it anyway thanks to all
Spent absolutely ages on Dung Beetle.. would have helped if I knew DUN. But got there once I got more letters. HACEK I had no idea what it meant, had to check once I’d put it in. Only clue I didn’t like was the Spooner, thought it was a pretty half hearted effort.
That’s the most repulsive Monday puzzle I’ve ever had the displeasure of slogging through. NHO half the entries, Snitch might as well have been 200.
You appear to be virtually alone in that view… I hope you are feeling better today.
An enjoyable Monday exercise, all done in 21 minutes. NHO the diacritic, but it emerged clearly enough from the clue. I first met the dung beetle many years ago in Aristophanes, but he was well disguised in 1ac.
FOI – TIDDLER
LOI – SCIATIC
COD – DUNG BEETLE
Thanks to ulaca and other contributors.